Wilderness birthed the mind, whose deep roots and flowering branches evolved not in the cities of our invention but in nature's challenging and instructive embrace. Maybe that's why the Buddha liked to go back there to recalibrate. Maybe that's why, when John the Baptist and Jesus wanted to be reborn, they stepped into a river outside of town. Maybe that's why in India, for millennia, those who want to re-imagine their humanity have dropped part or all of their clothing and stepped into the jungle.
"To study the buddha way is to study the self," goes the oft-repeated quote from Dogen Zenji, the medieval Buddhist philosopher who founded the Soto school of Zen in Japan. "To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by the myriad things."
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